Telugu Desam Party (TDP) General Secretary Nara Lokesh was issued notice by the Andhra Pradesh CID on Saturday, September 30. The notice asked Lokesh to appear before the CID on October 4 in Andhra Pradesh’s Guntur district for questioning his alleged involvement in the Amaravati Inner Ring Road case.
Meanwhile, the Andhra Pradesh High Court has restrained the police from arresting Lokesh in the skill development corporation case until October 4. In the same hearing, the CID had informed the court that they would be serving a 41-A notice (notice to appear before a police official) under the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC) to Lokesh in connection with the Amaravati Inner Ring Road case.
The CID had filed a memo in Vijayawada ACB Court on Tuesday, September 26, naming Lokesh, the son of former AP CM and TDP chief N Chandrababu Naidu, as an accused in the Inner Ring Road case. Naidu is currently in prison for his alleged involvement in the alleged skill development corporation scam case.
The CID had registered an FIR in May 2022 against Chandrababu Naidu, former municipal administration minister P Narayana, Heritage Foods Ltd, and others for alleged irregularities in the construction of an inner Ring Road in Amaravati.
The FIR was filed based on a complaint by the YSR Congress Party (YSRCP) Mangalgiri MLA A Rama Krishna Reddy. He alleged that government officials carried out illegal and corrupt activities between 2014 and 2019 during TDP’s rule. It has been alleged that the officials altered the Andhra Pradesh capital’s master plan design and alignment of the Ring Road so that specific individuals could profit from it.
Naidu has been accused of large-scale irregularities in land acquisition and other aspects of development of the state capital Amaravati. On September 19, the CID also filed a petition seeking a prisoner transfer warrant against Chandrababu Naidu in the FiberNet scam and the AP Skill Development scam.
The CID has already stated that it is probing Lokesh’s role in all three scams when he was a minister of IT, Panchayat and Rural Development in the AP under the TDP.